Age of Empires

THE BAD:
Large games can take an age (no pun intended) to complete

SUMMARY:
Age of Empires is a RTS game where the basic aim is to build up your civilisation from a few villagers up to a massive army and conquer the world. You can choose from various civilisations that actually existed and all of them have strengths and weaknesses. To win it’s best to capitalise on your strengths and use them.

In this game you can do single player missions where you are taken through some real life events and you play your way through them. The knowledge I’ve gained from this game is actually remarkable useful and has actually come up in conversations and quizzes from time to time. Tell that to people who think games aren’t educational! But the real fun of this game comes from playing multiplayer games either against the computer or other people.

To build up your civilisation you need to collect resources. These are food, wood and gold. These will be required to build your buildings, train army units and research technologies. Units called villagers are the ones who collect the resources and build and repair any buildings. They aren’t physically strong so it’s necessary to protect them with other units or just keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t wander into trouble. You do have a population limit and can only support so many units. To increase this value you need to build houses which will increase the threshold.

Using civilisations from the Greeks to the Persians to the Phoenicians you do battle with other people on a large map and basically try and kill everyone else. But different civilisations have access to different units. While you may be able to get the elite Cataphract cavalry unit, some other teams might not. Some teams (like the Hitties) excel in naval warfare, and the Babylonians have walls and towers with more hit points than usual so they excel at defence. It’s best to realise that some teams suit some maps better. Of course, you may have a favourite team to use and know all the positives and negatives with them and be able to exploit their units to your advantage. I used to love the Phoenicians and I was able to more than hold my own just by using a few units. And also each civilisation will have set advantages which differ for them all. For example the Egyptian priests automatically have +3 added to their conversion range, and with research that goes up to 16 and is the longest reach in the game making the Egyptian priests deadly on the battlefield.

Another thing you need to realise is that some units actually have attack bonuses against others. Some units are stronger against some and weaker against others. Sometimes it may not be profound, but when you put a horse archer against the slow moving (but extremely powerful) Hoplite, the archer will always win because it has enough time to fire, retreat a bit and fire again, retreat a bit and fire again and so on. So despite the fact that the Hoplite has a much higher attack strength, its slow speed means it will always lose unless you can surround the horseman. However, put a Hoplite against any other infantry unit and it will pound it into the ground with its brute power.

One of the more handy units are Priests. They have the ability to heal almost any friendly unit. But crucially they can convert other enemy units onto your side. They do need to regenerate after every successful conversion, but with a range of 10-13 (after research) and 16 with the Egyptians, they are a formidable foe. You can upgrade the attack of most units by researching things at various buildings. You also have to advance to the next age by upgrading at the town centre. You start off in the Dark Age and eventually get to the Iron Age if I remember correctly. As you advance through the ages better technology and units become available.

For me, the fact that the game was done with actual history in mind only made it more appealing to me. The Egyptians were a very religious race, so to give them very powerful priests is an appropriate touch and no doubt there are other similar touches that I never realised.

One downside is that some games can take an eternity to do, especially large multiplayer maps. If you can’t manage to break through an opponent’s defences you might find the game going for several hours. If you’re playing on your own that’s fine as you can save it, but online you can’t and it’s an easy way for several hours to go down the drain.

I first played a demo version of this round a friend’s house and was pretty impressed by it, so I went and bought the full version when it was released and I wasn’t disappointed at all. Age of Empires II is better than this, but if you can find this fairly cheaply or bundled together with the sequel then it’s worth getting if you like these types of games.